Prognostic significance of Ki-67 in chemotherapy-naive breast cancer patients with 10-year follow-up.

BACKGROUND/AIM: In order to define accurate survival outcome in breast cancer, 10-year follow-up is required and such long-term survival information are few and difficult to gather.

PATIENTS AND METHODS: We recruited 253 breast cancer patients who undertook operation with no prior chemotherapy. Ten-year survival outcomes were evaluated by clinicopathological factors.

RESULTS: Significant univariate prognostic factors were: T factor, N factor, preoperative values of tumor markers, and biological factors. T-factor, CEA, hormone receptor, and Ki-67 were the final independent prognostic factors of recurrence-free survival through multivariate analysis. The Luminal A group except for the Ki-67-positive cases showed the best survival outcomes, while the HER2-positive or triple-negative (TN) groups showed worse prognosis than the Luminal A group, and Ki-67 was shown to be an excellent prognostic factor in each stage (p<0.01).

CONCLUSION: Ki-67 has a great potential as a prognostic biomarker while prognostic information of this sort could be beneficial for development of novel therapeutic strategies.